Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central. Welcome back to the very show.
Speaker 2: My guest tonight is an award winning journalist, filmmaker, and
Speaker 2: best selling author whose latest book is called In My
Speaker 2: Time of Dying, How I Came face to face with
Speaker 2: the idea of an afterlife.
Speaker 3: Please welcome. Sebastian Younger.
Speaker 1: All right, wow, I.
Speaker 3: Mean amazing to hear all that you had a near
Speaker 3: death experience. You had an aneurysm, you bled out inside
Speaker 3: of your body.
Speaker 1: Did you die? I'm still working on that.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm pretty sure I didn't.
Speaker 1: Yes, But that's one of the great mysteries is how
Speaker 1: do we know? How do we know we're here?
Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about that. I mean, you're here, so
Speaker 3: I know that you're here. But I guess it begs
Speaker 3: a question of belief, of faith, of well.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the problem.
Speaker 5: After I came back from the hospital, I mean, I
Speaker 5: lost ten units of blood. I came very very close
Speaker 5: to dying. They barely saved me. And when I woke
Speaker 5: up in the ICU, I didn't know that I'd almost died.
Speaker 1: The nurse told me. And when I came home, I
Speaker 1: was seized with this fear that I had.
Speaker 5: Died and that this was all a hallucination, that it
Speaker 5: was because I was reading about near death experiences and
Speaker 5: I thought, maybe I maybe I did die and this
Speaker 5: is just And I asked my wife, I said, just
Speaker 5: tell me I'm really here. I was slowly going crazy, right,
Speaker 5: but I said to my wife, just tell me I'm here,
Speaker 5: I'm really here, that I actually survived. And she said,
Speaker 5: of course you are, honey, right, And I thought, that's
Speaker 5: exactly the kind of thing a hallucination.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, tell us what happened.
Speaker 3: I mean, you you start the book with this amazing
Speaker 3: scary story of you surfing and almost dying, which I'm
Speaker 3: kind of reading this gone Sebastian. You're almost dying a lot.
Speaker 3: But then tell us what happened with you know, you're
Speaker 3: talking about losing so much blood. It was unrelated to
Speaker 3: the surfing, obviously.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean when I was young, I surfed and I
Speaker 5: almost round in the winter in January on Cape Cod,
Speaker 5: which was just stupid to be doing in the first place, right,
Speaker 5: But I got then. I was a war reporter for
Speaker 5: a long time, Yeah, and I had very close calls.
Speaker 5: I was almost killed a number of times, Yeah, which
Speaker 5: is different from the experience of dying, right, I mean
Speaker 5: I had bullets, say close to my head three inches away?
Speaker 1: Is that a lot or a little with a bullet?
Speaker 3: I don't know, Like it was an right, I've never
Speaker 3: ever had to ask myself that way, and I don't
Speaker 3: want it, and I don't want it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But then I stopped war reporting. I had a family,
Speaker 5: two little girls. I turned towards life, right, I gave
Speaker 5: all that optic war reporting now, and then one day,
Speaker 5: in mid sentence, I felt this pain shoot through my abdomen.
Speaker 5: And it was an aneurysm, a ballooning of one of
Speaker 5: my arteries, which is just like a structural defect.
Speaker 1: Right, it ruptured. Yeah, And it'd been.
Speaker 5: The aneurism had been growing my entire life, and it
Speaker 5: chose that moment June sixteenth, four years ago, round six pm,
Speaker 5: to rupture. And I was losing a unit of blood
Speaker 5: every ten or fifteen minutes.
Speaker 3: And how much units of blood can we lose?
Speaker 5: You have about ten or twelve units, ok, you, and
Speaker 5: you can lose about two thirds of it, which I did, right, So,
Speaker 5: but we were.
Speaker 3: I'm not laughing at you, at you dying. I'm laughing
Speaker 3: that that's so much of your I mean, it's insane,
Speaker 3: this is wild.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the problem was we we lived an hour away.
Speaker 5: From a hospital, right, and I'm losing a unit every
Speaker 5: ten or fifteen minutes. You can do the math. I
Speaker 5: was basically a human hourglass. And when I got to
Speaker 5: the er, the doctors immediately knew.
Speaker 1: Oh, this guy's dying.
Speaker 5: And suddenly I saw this doctor above me with this
Speaker 5: huge needle and he said, do I have permission to
Speaker 5: stick this into your jugular?
Speaker 1: And I was like, not really.
Speaker 3: I mean, can I read the terms and condition exactly right?
Speaker 5: I had no idea I was dying, And so I
Speaker 5: said to him, you mean in case there's an emergency.
Speaker 1: He was like, this is the emergency right now.
Speaker 3: And you talk about that in the book. And that
Speaker 3: actually gave me chills to envision it from your perspective,
Speaker 3: looking up, hearing the noises of a hospital, which are
Speaker 3: just so deliberately hospitally, the noises, the faces, and to
Speaker 3: hear the doctor say this is the emergency and.
Speaker 1: Yes, And so I said, yes, of course.
Speaker 5: So we started putting it in, working up my neck
Speaker 5: with an ultrasound probe and the needle, and while he
Speaker 5: was doing that suddenly, and I have to stop here
Speaker 5: and say, I've been an atheist my whole life. My
Speaker 5: dad was a physicist. He was an atheist. I'm a rationalist.
Speaker 5: I'm not mystic. In fact, I'm anti mystic. I'm like
Speaker 5: anti woo woo. Just the works, right, So just to
Speaker 5: get that, like.
Speaker 3: That sound hair comes some wooo.
Speaker 5: So all of a sudden, as he's working on my neck,
Speaker 5: I feel this immense black void appear under beneath me,
Speaker 5: this black pit, and I'm getting pulled into it. I
Speaker 5: don't know I'm dying, but I know I don't want
Speaker 5: to go into the infinitely black pit, Like I have
Speaker 5: this sense that if you do that, you're not coming back, right,
Speaker 5: this sort of animal instinct.
Speaker 1: And I started panicking.
Speaker 5: And as I panicked, my dead father appeared above me
Speaker 5: and said communicated to me, it's okay, don't fight it.
Speaker 1: I'll take care of you. Can come with me. And
Speaker 1: I was like, you're dead. I'm not going with you, but.
Speaker 5: Dad, we have nothing to talk about, right, Like, we'll
Speaker 5: talk later a lot later.
Speaker 3: And I said to the doctor, you got to hurt
Speaker 3: such a that's such a sun thing to sell you.
Speaker 3: I didn't ask you to come over here a complex exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And I said to the doctor, you got
Speaker 1: to hurry. You're losing me right now.
Speaker 5: I'm going yeah. And that's the last thing I remembered.
Speaker 1: For a while.
Speaker 3: So the believer in me wants to think, your dad,
Speaker 3: who you talk about in this book, maybe wasn't always
Speaker 3: there for you emotionally. It was this very rational person
Speaker 3: was maybe spectrum spectrum okay, was crossing over to be
Speaker 3: there for you emotionally in this difficult time. The skeptic
Speaker 3: in me thinks, you've lost all your blood and you're
Speaker 3: going mad?
Speaker 1: Is that? Are you there too?
Speaker 5: I'm very sympathetic to both ways of thinking. So this
Speaker 5: is what happened. They saved my life. I went home
Speaker 5: five days later.
Speaker 3: There's such an unbelievable description of the doctors. And I
Speaker 3: had just I've already had respect for trauma doctors, but
Speaker 3: what they know about the human body, what they're able
Speaker 3: to do with in matters of seconds to save people's
Speaker 3: lives as tremendous.
Speaker 1: It's incredible.
Speaker 4: And they did so.
Speaker 5: They saved me with a catheter, right and and so
Speaker 5: what they do is they put a catheter into your
Speaker 5: femeral artery at your groin, and they can thread it
Speaker 5: up through your vasculature and wiggle it around and get
Speaker 5: to almost.
Speaker 1: Anywhere in your body. Right.
Speaker 5: This was discovered by a guy named Forsmut, a German
Speaker 5: physician a long time ago.
Speaker 1: Talk about it in here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he couldn't get permission to do this on a patient,
Speaker 5: so he did it to himself, threaded it all the
Speaker 5: way into his heart, and then he walked down the
Speaker 5: hall to the X ray room and asked the technician
Speaker 5: to take a photograph of his chest to prove he'd
Speaker 5: been in his own heart with a catheter.
Speaker 4: Right that.
Speaker 3: Imagine how good the kids will be today after all.
Speaker 3: The video goes totally right exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I was on a fluoroscope for so long. It
Speaker 5: took them so long to do this that I was
Speaker 5: lying on this sort of square plate where they it
Speaker 5: admits X rays basically right.
Speaker 1: And I was on this.
Speaker 5: Thing for so long that when I got home, I
Speaker 5: had this square burn mark on my back from the plate.
Speaker 5: I had radiation burns on my back and this perfect square.
Speaker 5: Of course, my wife didn't like that much, neither did I,
Speaker 5: And then I tried to make it better by saying
Speaker 5: we can just call it square noble, and.
Speaker 4: It didn't work.
Speaker 3: You're a journalist, and I'm like, come, idiot, let's let's
Speaker 3: talk about having this experience touching death. How has it
Speaker 3: affected your life? I mean, does it give this more meaning?
Speaker 3: Should we all get close to death so we appreciate
Speaker 3: this tiny moment we have? Are these all the things
Speaker 3: you're grappling with?
Speaker 1: No, No, don't do that. Okay, there are shortcuts, right,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 3: Psychedelics, ayahuasca, So.
Speaker 5: My eyes, I mean, I'm still an atheist, but what
Speaker 5: I can ask you that, Yeah, I'm still an atheist.
Speaker 5: I don't believe in God, but my mind was sort
Speaker 5: of open to the possibility that there is a some
Speaker 5: kind of post death reality, maybe at the quantum level.
Speaker 5: And I'm sort of reaching into my father's field of physics, maybe.
Speaker 1: At the quantum level. That we just don't understand how
Speaker 1: this all works.
Speaker 5: I say in my book, we might understand reality like
Speaker 5: a dog understands a television screen, Like there's no concept
Speaker 5: of the greater reality that's producing the image that the
Speaker 5: dog sees that we see. So God and an afterlife
Speaker 5: are separate, separate things. They don't need each other. You
Speaker 5: could have a God and no after life, and after
Speaker 5: life and no God either or both. So I'm still
Speaker 5: in atheist, But what I would say is that the
Speaker 5: greatest and I say this in my book, I don't.
Speaker 1: Go to church, but.
Speaker 5: I believe that the greatest worship of what some people
Speaker 5: call God's creation, which is the world and life and
Speaker 5: what atheists just called creation, the greatest worship of that
Speaker 5: is being fully engaged in your life, all in the
Speaker 5: moments of your life, in all of its emotional reality.
Speaker 5: If you none of us know that this isn't our
Speaker 5: last day. No one in this room, no one on
Speaker 5: this knows this isn't their last day. So who do
Speaker 5: you want to be on your last day? Be that
Speaker 5: person on every day.
Speaker 3: It's amazing to me that you you've survived an ied
Speaker 3: attack in Afghanistan, you're a war reporter, but you are
Speaker 3: back home on a normal day. Is when you kind
Speaker 3: of came to this realization.
Speaker 5: Well, that's why I got so crazy after rest, right,
Speaker 5: So I'd go to war zones and I had to
Speaker 5: deal with myself like, Okay, you're rolling the dice. You're
Speaker 5: gonna do this to get that and you know whatever.
Speaker 5: It was a deal that I made, and I had
Speaker 5: a few close calls, and then I stopped doing that.
Speaker 5: After my friend and colleague Tim Heatherington led out in
Speaker 5: the back of a rebel pickup truck in Libya. I'm
Speaker 5: not okay, I'm out right, and I turned towards life.
Speaker 5: I had a family's an amazing family, two little girls, and
Speaker 5: I thought I was safe, right, right, and what a
Speaker 5: helpful illusion, right, and then one beautiful June afternoon, turns
Speaker 5: out the front lines can come to you. It's like
Speaker 5: owing the mafia money. Right, you can get a cabin.
Speaker 4: In the woods. They will find you for their money, right, they.
Speaker 1: Will track you down. And that's what That's what it
Speaker 1: felt like.
Speaker 3: What will you do on the anniversary of this moment
Speaker 3: or do you just kind of speed past that you
Speaker 3: don't need to honor it because June's coming up? Is
Speaker 3: there something is something you'll do?
Speaker 5: You know, it's a day, It's a thoughtful day, you know.
Speaker 5: And there's a number of days during the year where
Speaker 5: people very close to me have died like Tim, their
Speaker 5: thoughtful days. And you know, mortality is terrifying. But if
Speaker 5: you don't let it be terrifying, it could make life miraculous,
Speaker 5: and you can kind of choose, and if you're not
Speaker 5: sufficiently terrified, life isn't going to be sufficiently miraculous, and
Speaker 5: vice versa. And so that to me is how one
Speaker 5: lives one's life.
Speaker 3: Quickly, talk about some strangers that you didn't know helped
Speaker 3: save your life by something we all can do every day,
Speaker 3: which is provide blood.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so ten I needed ten units of blood. I'd
Speaker 5: lost two thirds of my blood. Right, I was sixty
Speaker 5: over forty when I hit the er, and ten anonymous
Speaker 5: donors gave a unit of blood that saved my life. Right,
Speaker 5: So now I give blood as much as I can.
Speaker 5: It doesn't hurt, it doesn't even take an hour. And
Speaker 5: there are very few opportunities where you can be part
Speaker 5: of something greater than yourself. In this modern society. The
Speaker 5: chance doesn't come up very much. It only comes up
Speaker 5: in three context.
Speaker 1: You need to vote right, you need to serve jury duty,
Speaker 1: and you need to give blood.
Speaker 5: If you don't do those three things, you're an awesome
Speaker 5: human being.
Speaker 1: I would say one more.
Speaker 3: You have to buy Okay, you have to buy Rudy
Speaker 3: Giuliani's coffee. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 4: And sharing your story.
Speaker 1: I very much appease all.
Speaker 2: My guest Tonight is an EGOT winning multi platinum artist
Speaker 2: and activist who hosts the new original audio documentary Afghan Star.
Speaker 3: Please welcome John Legend.
Speaker 6: Thank you all.
Speaker 1: Here we go.
Speaker 3: He got winning multi platinum. I wasn't expecting to see
Speaker 3: your name on audio documentary Afghan Star.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm a podcast host. Now my biggest aspiration finally
Speaker 6: come to life.
Speaker 3: Tell me about this new project. How did you get involved?
Speaker 6: Afghan Star is the name of a competition show, so
Speaker 6: it's like American Idol or The Voice. But the revolutionary
Speaker 6: fact was that it was in Afghanistan. Yes, and prior
Speaker 6: to the US invasion, the Taliban was in charge and
Speaker 6: they had basically outlawed music in the country, so literally
Speaker 6: they would have bonfires, burn CDs and records and musical instruments,
Speaker 6: and so there was a whole generation of people that
Speaker 6: were growing up not having access to the most basic
Speaker 6: thing that we all.
Speaker 4: Love, that's a part of all of our lives. Music.
Speaker 6: And so when the Taliban was deposed and there was
Speaker 6: this new freedom that was permeating through the country, one
Speaker 6: of the producers there who had started this network.
Speaker 4: Called Tolo TV.
Speaker 6: He decided to start a singing competition show, and he
Speaker 6: had no idea how revolutionary it would be, because not
Speaker 6: only was it displaying music on television, but it was
Speaker 6: giving women opportunities that they never had before. It was
Speaker 6: challenging a lot of the societal norms and some of
Speaker 6: the religious.
Speaker 4: Strictures that had been on the country for a long time.
Speaker 6: And it was quite a cultural moment that impacted the
Speaker 6: entire country.
Speaker 3: I mean, you talk about in the podcast how the
Speaker 3: Taliban used to stop people cars and if there was
Speaker 3: a cassette tape in there, yes, they would beat up
Speaker 3: the driver and then rip up the cassette teve and
Speaker 3: hang it from a tree.
Speaker 4: They would unspool the.
Speaker 6: Actual tape from the cassette and hang it up so
Speaker 6: people would know you can't have this.
Speaker 3: As an American, I listened to this stuff, it almost
Speaker 3: seems fictitious. Yeah, I just that's never even I mean,
Speaker 3: it's how spoiled lab It's never crossed my mind that
Speaker 3: people cannot have music. YEA, is your approach to music
Speaker 3: any differently now?
Speaker 1: Knowing that?
Speaker 3: Is your approach to music now any different?
Speaker 1: Knowing that?
Speaker 6: Well, I always knew music was such a gift, but
Speaker 6: I think you can take it for granted because it's
Speaker 6: something that's just part of your lives. And you know,
Speaker 6: we've had it as part of our culture forever, and
Speaker 6: every country's pretty much had it as a part of
Speaker 6: their culture forever.
Speaker 4: But to have it taken away it is quite a thing.
Speaker 6: And to see the links people went through to get
Speaker 6: music back into their lives, the underground networks that they
Speaker 6: would have to use to smuggle in records that they
Speaker 6: want to listen to, the parties they would have with
Speaker 6: live music out of the reach of the government and police.
Speaker 6: All of these things just shows you how important music
Speaker 6: is to our lives and how meaningful it can be,
Speaker 6: and to see it taken away makes you really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: It's almost like the Taliban hasn't seen footloose.
Speaker 4: I know exactly know what of these things.
Speaker 6: Do music, And you know what's happened since the tali
Speaker 6: End's back in charge again, So you know, you would
Speaker 6: think maybe there is no music again in Afghanistan, But
Speaker 6: once you let the genie out of the bottle, it's
Speaker 6: really hard to suppress the people's desire to get music
Speaker 6: and now, with the Internet being more prevalent and everyone
Speaker 6: kind of getting used to the fact that music was
Speaker 6: in their lives, it's kind of hard for the Talviion
Speaker 6: to stop them so listening to music now.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite parts in the pod was when
Speaker 3: he decides to have auditions and he's like, is anybody
Speaker 3: gonna show up?
Speaker 4: Oh my god?
Speaker 3: And then he gets to this hotel and security is
Speaker 3: furious at him because there's hundreds of people there.
Speaker 4: Everybody wanted to be probably moody.
Speaker 3: But but then he starts rolling cameras and he's like,
Speaker 3: guess what, everybody's a bad singer, which wasn't the case.
Speaker 3: There was good singers, but there's also a lot of
Speaker 3: bad singing, sure, as there is everywhere.
Speaker 4: You have to go through the audition process exactly.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: It showed a lot of things because one of the
Speaker 6: things that Afghanistan hadn't done was vote for anything, right,
Speaker 6: and so this was like an opportunity for them to vote.
Speaker 4: And they were like we laugh.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm laughing at this, but it's like, holy shit,
Speaker 3: that another thing Americans just.
Speaker 4: We take for granted. You know, it's like, yeah, vote,
Speaker 4: let's talk.
Speaker 3: And another thing I mean, let's talk about the role
Speaker 3: of women in Afghanistan. This was such a this was
Speaker 3: such a groundbreaking cultural change for them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So one of the most controversial things at the beginning
Speaker 6: of the show was when a woman was performing on
Speaker 6: the show and she started dancing just a little bit,
Speaker 6: a little shimmy and and they were very upset about that.
Speaker 4: And then her job starts to sneak back a little bit.
Speaker 6: You see a little bit of her hair, and these
Speaker 6: are you know, norms that had been enforced right with
Speaker 6: with the with the gun, with with with the threat
Speaker 6: of death, and so the fact that people were doing
Speaker 6: this on national television was quite daring. And then we
Speaker 6: had a judge named Ariana Said, who was a pop
Speaker 6: star and she was very well known in Afghanistan and
Speaker 6: she became a judge, and her life was under threat
Speaker 6: all the time because she was a symbol of women's
Speaker 6: liberation just by the fact that she was there as
Speaker 6: a judge. And she actually mentored a few of the
Speaker 6: female contestants and one of them finally won after several
Speaker 6: years of the show being on the air, and it
Speaker 6: was quite a moment for women in Afghanistan to have
Speaker 6: access to this and one of the things that we
Speaker 6: are doing with our fundraiser, with the art sale that
Speaker 6: we're doing is making sure we raise money for the
Speaker 6: North Foundation in Afghanistan, which make sure women have access
Speaker 6: to education and all the things they need.
Speaker 3: And there are some unique pieces of art per episode
Speaker 3: there's art created or something.
Speaker 4: Yes, we have unique pieces of art.
Speaker 6: I've signed some of them and each of them represents
Speaker 6: stories from the episodes, and so they're very vivid and
Speaker 6: and beautiful and people can check him out.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 3: It's nice to have you here in New York. I
Speaker 3: mean Trump's in the Bronx today. I was wondering, you know,
Speaker 3: is that why you're here to Uh.
Speaker 4: You're politically outspoke.
Speaker 6: Feel like he would be here a lot of days nowadays.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 4: I think he has true.
Speaker 3: How are you feeling this election? I mean, you're politically outspoken.
Speaker 3: What can people be doing? What should people be doing?
Speaker 6: Well, of course they should vote, and I'll be voting
Speaker 6: for Joe Biden. I think it's a clear choice.
Speaker 4: You know, it's a clear choice.
Speaker 6: And we talk about things we take for granted, but
Speaker 6: there is one candidate that isn't too keen on democracy.
Speaker 4: Isn't too keen on us having the right to vote.
Speaker 6: He literally tried to steal an election and nullify the
Speaker 6: votes of the American people, and I feel like that
Speaker 6: is utterly disqualifying and he should not ever be anywhere
Speaker 6: close to the nuclear codes, the White House, the oball,
Speaker 6: and I'm gonna do my best to make sure he
Speaker 6: doesn't get back there.
Speaker 4: I appreciate you chatting with me. Thank you very much,
Speaker 4: John Legend.
Speaker 5: Everybody explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe
Speaker 5: by searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Watch The Daily Show weeknights at eleven.
Speaker 5: Tenh Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime
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